Pondering Site Changes

Jan 23, 2015
• Stephen Houser
in website

Here I sit, looking at past projects (portfolio) and posts thinking of
the work that goes into the site versus the work that goes into the
content. The result is, too much time goes into the site and not enough
into the content. There must be an easier way. A way to encourage myself
to write more content and avoid my temptation to tinker with site
mechanics.

There are also numerous places where I maintain some form of content.
Some are more regular than others. While they all have their primary
goals, I get them mixed up once in a while. And I also purposefully mix
them up sometimes, while living on the edge of the life-work balance. I
need to sort that out and make it require much less mental energy.

There are several different chunks of content out there; course
materials, past projects, quotes, book notes, development notes, project
ideas, publications, and other uncategorised things. Looking at the
spread, coming up with a category list might be a great first step.

Here is my initial category list for articles:

development – general development thoughts and ideas

mobile – development and projects geared towards mobile devices

release – news release type things, products in app stores

product – release product articles, notes, information

courses – related to courses taught or taken (I don’t like this tag name)

cos450 – COS 450/540 Operating Systems @ USM

cos460 – COS 460/5?? Computer Networks @ USM

cos399 – COS 399 Programming Autonomous Robots @ USM

cos497 – COS 497 Independent Study @ USM

site – website notes, updates, improvements

quote – collected quotes

book – book notes, taken from Kindle, iBooks, etc.

car – related to fixing vehicles and motors

radio – related to amatuer radio

electronics – electronic projects, hardware

games – related to games, video or otherwise

Now I need to commit to some next steps to actually get this done. Here,
of course, is where I usually fall down. For personal projects I tend
not to be very good at following a schedule. It’s my project, why should
I? So here is a not-schedule but some general ideas on next steps
instead.

Commit to a template and stick to it.

Force content into the template, break projects out where they make sense.